Meet Me Here (9 page)

Mallory wants to retrace her steps—to check the cafeteria, the darkened wings of the sleeping hospital—but I limp toward the parking lot. He isn’t getting a late-night snack or haunting the hallways. He’s gone.

“Maybe we should wait near the emergency room,” Mallory says. “Or maybe he’s by the truck?”

I keep stumbling forward. He’s not at the truck. He’s off . . . where? Running through the shadows of our small town. But for what reason? That’s the big question, of course. Why he needs to disappear. Why he can’t just turn himself back on, flip whatever switch got rearranged inside his head.

When we get to the truck and he’s not there, my point proved, I put my head on the hood and try to think. The pain in my leg makes it difficult to form clear thoughts, especially when Mallory’s phone goes off again. I stand up, and my vision swims momentarily. I’m not sure if it’s my leg or everything else.

“If you’re not going to talk to him, just turn off the phone already,” I say.

She silences the phone as it rings, giving me a hateful look. “This isn’t my fault.”

“Thanks for clearing that up,” I say, tweaking my leg as I move to the driver’s side of the door. I grimace, and the annoyance drifts from her face.

“Give me the keys,” she says, rubbing her hand over her face. “We’ll go find him.”

“I don’t need you to drive.”

I try to take a step, and another bolt of pain shoots up my leg. She blocks the door and says, “Listen, I get that you’re worried. And if you want me to help you, I will. But the first thing you need to do is stop being an asshole, and then we can start searching for him.”

I’m going to scream. To punch the truck until my knuckles bleed. I have to move, to do something before
all the pain and anxiety and anger that are inside me mix together and become a bomb. I halfheartedly take another step toward the door, and when Mallory sees me cringe, she leads me to the passenger side and doesn’t move until my seat belt is buckled.

After she gets in and starts the truck, she takes a deep breath and says: “Do you think he went home?”

I don’t answer her at first, because I honestly hadn’t thought about that. If we go back now and he’s not there, then I have to answer not only for being out all night, but for losing Jake, too. At this point I have no idea what to say to my parents about either question without being completely honest.

“I don’t think he would go home,” I finally say, trying to believe it.

“So . . . where then?”

I look out into the empty parking lot. Before, when Jake was in high school—when he wasn’t so bent—the possibilities would’ve been endless: parties, friends, football, and baseball games. It’s just as endless now, of course, but there’s no framework to lean on. No way to anticipate even the simplest of scenarios.

A security guard in a golf cart, yellow lights spinning
across the parking lot, pulls up to the driver’s side of the truck and gets out. He shines a flashlight into the cab, the beam right in our eyes.

“You can’t sit here,” he says. His hair is tied in a long black ponytail, and he glares at us like somebody who doesn’t get paid enough to deal with this sort of bullshit.

“He was a patient,” Mallory says, motioning to me. “And then his brother ran off. About six-two. Short black hair. Beard. He was wearing—” She looks at me, and I tell the security guard about Jake’s T-shirt, his pants. Mallory turns back to the guard and says, “Did you see him?”

“You two can’t sit in the parking lot,” he says again, tapping his flashlight on the side of the truck twice. Mallory cocks her head to the side, as if she didn’t understand what he said.

“We’re not
sitting
in the parking lot.” Her voice breaks as she says it, straining to be polite. To not rip this guy’s head off. “Like I said, we’re trying to find his brother who’s”— she pauses and then, less confidently, says—“sick.”

The security guard leans his mouth close to a microphone clipped to his shoulder, pausing to consider us one last time before he presses a button and says, “Five-four,
this is Lucien. I have a possible resist and detain.”

Mallory explodes. “
Resist and detain
? What the hell are you talking about?”

The security guard jumps back, dropping his hands into a ready position. As if Mallory were going to come through the window. To be honest, she looks like she just might.

“Calm down,” he says.

“I explained to you why we’re sitting here. And now you’re going to
detain
us?” She laughs. “Yeah, okay.”

“Mallory,” I say, but she ignores me. Everything she has is trained on this guy. I speak to him instead. “Hey, I’m sorry, sir, but we’re going now. Right, Mallory?”

The security guard reaches forward, putting one hand on the truck and another on his mic. “Five-four, permission to detain subjects for trespassing.”

Then he smiles. It’s the smile that gets me.

“I just got stitches!” I point down to my leg, but he doesn’t look. “How in the hell is that trespassing?”

“Loitering then.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

Mallory makes another frustrated noise and hits the steering wheel. “Listen, mall cop, we’re leaving. It will save us all the embarrassment. That way you can pretend
that you were going to
detain
us and we can go on with our night. So, adios.”

Lucien steps forward and says, “I can’t let you do that.”

It all happens in one quick motion. Mallory glances at me and smiles, really quickly, before slamming down the clutch and shifting into first gear, nearly bunny hopping the truck forward, as Lucien yells out. She skips second gear completely, putting us straight in third as we fly across the parking lot. I turn around and watch Lucien run a few steps before skidding to a stop and then racing back to his golf cart. We’re already out of the parking lot before he gets there.

I keep checking behind us, fully expecting to see cops or at least Lucien’s golf cart with its spinning yellow lights giving chase. But after a few blocks, when nobody appears, Mallory looks over at me and says, “Calm down, that guy’s not doing anything.”

“I’m not worried. But I do wish you hadn’t gone at him.”

“Am I the one who dropped an F-bomb on the guy? Uh-uh. So, jump off that pedestal, Bennett.”

“Well . . .” I start to form an objection, but I can’t. For a second, I almost lob out a lame joke, something like
“I don’t think I should be jumping off of anything else tonight.” It would be stupid, but she’d laugh; we’d laugh. Things would snap back to the way they were before. But then reality crashes into me, and of course all I can say is “I just want to find Jake.”

Mallory turns right onto Fairgrove Church Road. In the distance is the interstate. Wilco, a gas station that surely has some of our fellow graduates hanging around its parking lot, smoking and pretending like they’re not drinking beer, and a Waffle House dot either side of the road. She guns the engine, pushing us through a yellow light and at the last second skids into the parking lot of the Waffle House.

“Okay, first things first. I need to go to the bathroom, and I’m not going in that gas station. It’s disgusting.” She looks at the gas station, then back to the Waffle House. “Not that this is going to be much better. While I’m in there, call your brother. Keep calling him until he answers.”

How many times has he ignored me, every attempt I’ve made since he came back? Why would a simple phone call make him respond? Mallory reaches over and puts a hand on my forearm.

“Just try. If he answers, great. We go pick him up, and this is all over. If he doesn’t . . .” She trails off for a moment. “Well, we’ll drive around until we find him. How far could he have gotten?”

Truthfully, probably not too far. It’s not like he’s in shape. A small belly has formed under his T-shirts, and his face looks subtly different. Like a blurry photograph. But we still didn’t know which direction he had gone. We could drive all night and never find him, actually end up farther away from him than when we started.

Mallory reaches over and takes my phone from me. She scrolls down, pushes a button, and hands it back. I can hear it ringing as she says, “I’ll only be a minute.”

When Jake’s voicemail greeting starts, I almost hang up. In the background, someone laughs as the recording starts. “This is Jake”—pause, more background laughter—“leave me a message.” And then, just before the recording cuts off, Jake says, “You two are idiots.” I have no idea who they are or why Jake didn’t redo the whole thing, but he sounds happy in a way I didn’t remember was possible. I keep dialing his number, and every time I listen to the whole thing.

Somebody hits the hood of my truck, and I jump.
Wayne’s standing in front of me, arms spread wide and grinning like a fool. Sinclair gives me a nod.

“The prodigal son, back again!”

I don’t immediately get out, both because of my leg and what I know is the reality of officially acknowledging Wayne’s presence. It means pulling him in, letting him know about Jake. I finally open the door when he hits the hood again and says, “What the shit, Bennett!”

I lower myself out slowly, and Sinclair says, “Oh, hell. What happened to you?”

“It’s nothing,” I say.

“Shit. Did Will and his friends do this?” Wayne comes over and investigates my leg. “I swear to God I’ll kill those preppy assholes.”

“They didn’t do it,” I say. “I jumped off the River Road bridge.”

Wayne looks surprised at first, but then he starts nodding, his smile brighter than the Waffle House sign behind him. “So it’s gonna be
that
kind of night then. Hell, yes.”

I should tell him he’s wrong; it’s not any kind of night. But I don’t have the energy or the will to do it. I can’t lie about why I jumped in the river, and I sure as hell can’t tell him about the medals. So I let him stand there with his
arms out, annoyed that he didn’t get to jump off a bridge, too.

“This makes me twice as pissed that you left me up there with old bee-in-his-ass Steve,” Wayne says. “That dude didn’t calm down until Will finally showed up. I should’ve let you kick his ass.”

“Will asked about you,” Sinclair said.

“Yeah, looking all sad and shit,” Wayne says, pantomiming a tear. “Broke my heart.”

Mallory is coming out of the restaurant, pausing to stare at her phone. I talk quickly, hoping to end this conversation before she gets back to the truck.

“Will’s fine. He’s not going to do anything. He and Mallory—” I have no idea how to catch them up or explain Mallory’s status.

“The way I hear it, she straight up knocked his dick in the dirt at Chris Jensen’s party,” Wayne says. “Are you sure you two aren’t—” He makes an obscene gesture, and I shake my head.

“What the hell was
that
?” Mallory says, putting her phone in her pocket. “Got something stuck down there, Wayne?”

“Wanna find out?”

“That would be a disappointment for both of us.”

Sinclair laughs, and, eventually so does Wayne.

“I asked your brother if you were still out raising hell,” Wayne says to me. “But he was no help at all.”

“Wait, you’ve seen Jake?” I ask.

“He was with Becky Patterson,” Sinclair says. “Over at the Wilco.”

“Becky
Patterson
,” Wayne affirms, elbowing me in the side. “Your brother’s living a charmed life, son.”

“Did they leave?” I ask, trying to see past the trees that fence the Waffle House parking lot from the interstate. I turn to Mallory. “We need to go.”

“Go?” Wayne says. “It’s graduation. The hell you have to
go
anywhere. Besides, Sin was just about to buy me breakfast.”

“I told you, I don’t have any money,” Sinclair says.

As they argue, I limp toward the door of the truck and am about to get in when Wayne runs up and says, “Whoa, whoa. Where you going, Bennett?”

“I don’t want to ruin your graduation,” I say, slowly getting in my seat. “But I need to find him. And I’m pretty sure Becky Patterson isn’t going to be able to handle him.”

Wayne giggles, elbowing Sinclair in the ribs a few times,
until Mallory says, “Really? Are you two years old?”

“Damn, everybody’s so serious tonight,” Wayne says. “Listen, I don’t know what your brother’s packing, but—”

Mallory sighs.

“Sorry. Jesus. You don’t need to find him. I know where they’re going. They’re going to her house, son. Her
house
.”

Mallory shakes her head, getting in the truck. Before she starts it, Wayne and Sinclair jump into the bed, hitting the roof twice. Mallory opens the sliding rear window and says, “Idiots. Get out.”

“Like I’m going to sit here with Sinclair while you’re off doing . . . well, whatever’s got you all tangled. I ain’t missing another bridge, okay? This is our last hurrah and shit.”

Wayne hits the top of my truck and yells, “Deerfield, bitches!”

“Let them come,” I say, trying to force the frustration out of my voice as she glares into the bed of the pickup. “It will take another fifteen minutes to get them out of the truck anyway. And we know where he is now. So let’s just go.”

Wayne’s still hooting and hollering in the back, half drunk and shouting about adventures and destiny. When Mallory looks back one last time, I reach out and cautiously touch her hand.

“Or you could pull out really fast and hope they fall out,” I say, smiling.

On cue, Sinclair leans down and sticks his head through the window. “Are we going or what?”

Mallory tries to scowl, but I see the smile peek through as she says, “Hold on, moron.”

Deerfield is on top of a hill, a neighborhood filled with houses bigger than our school. The party Mallory and I left hours ago is still raging as she weaves through the maze of cars. People walk in the shadows, holding hands and hugging. Some of them lie on the lawns of the houses, only visible from their subtle movements and muffled giggles. Becky lives up ahead, on a small side street, which, since her house is the only one on the road, is a glorified driveway. Mallory cuts the lights and parks a few feet away from the entrance.

Wayne and Sinclair jump off the back of the truck. Wayne does a commando barrel roll and starts army crawling toward the house, which gets Sinclair laughing. He pops up and jogs over, drumming the side of my door.